During the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, at the General Electric pavilion “Carousel of Progress”, they simulated the dream home of the future in an exhibit called, “The glories of today”. The dream home featured: a glass-enclosed and electrically heated patio; a central “weather-tron” cooling system (a predecessor to today's air conditioning); a kitchen that all but runs itself, with a dishwashing machine; a washer/dryer that actually folds up the clothes; a central home vacuum system; a TV with a hand control unit and the ability record video built in; and special broadcast where people would be learning Greek and Latin over the air (a predecessor to today's internet).
However, not only did the home have special appliances and features but they envisioned special lighting and display systems built right into the walls and windows that they simulated including: translucent walls that changed colors to set moods, entire walls that would evenly light up the room, and high tech windows that would show beautiful outdoor scenery, even if it was raining outside.
While many of the speculated special appliances and features are now in our modern homes (excluding the washer/dryer that also folds clothes), the passage of time has failed to achieve the house of the future related to lightweight, thin, uniform, wall lighting and large, thin, affordable, scenic windows.
Instead, over 50 years later, what the passage of time has brought us is not thin, light, affordable lighting, but instead, large print billboards that are being replaced by even larger and complicated graphical LED displays.
As a result, large screen graphical displays are becoming increasing popular. As they become increasingly popular, in order to standout, advertisers want bigger and bigger graphical displays. However, those displays are made up of individual frames so that, as the scale increases so do the number of frames and the time required to calibrate the frames. In addition, those frames must be serviced from either the front or the back and, given the size, often require a huge bucket truck to do so. In order to decrease calibration time, the frame sizes have been increased; however, this increases the cost of replacement parts and also requires additional wiring, adding significant weight. Another big factor to the use of larger frames becomes display thickness. Larger frames require bigger power supplies mounted directly behind them and these bigger power supplies not only force the display thickness to be bigger but also require additional space for cooling and maintenance, and in some cases forced air-cooling or air conditioning as well.
Simply scaling current sign technology makes the sign so heavy that it typically cannot be supported without either building an extensive external support structure or significantly affecting the quality of the display.
Therefore, there continues to be a need for lighting and graphical displays that do not suffer from one or more of: being limited in length or width, added display thickness, requiring extensive and/or extra wiring to meet power needs, requiring heat sinks or air conditioning to dissipate excess heat when the displays run at peak power, requiring service from either the front or the back, requiring complex lensing or tedious calibration in order to provide a uniform display, having excessive weight that requires adding extra support, being subject to localized effects of expansion and contraction and/or display density/resolution issues.